John Price
Johnson Development Center, Silicon Valley, 2012
“Can a robot learn like a child? Can it learn a variety of new skills and new knowledge unspecified at design time and in a partially unknown and changing environment? How can it discover its body and its relationships with the physical and social environment? How can its cognitive capacities continuously develop without the intervention of an engineer once it is "out of the factory"? What can it learn through natural social interactions with humans? These are the questions at the center of developmental robotics.”– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developmental_robotics
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A couple of weeks after the briefing, Connor walks into Patrick’s office where he’s going over some numbers with Helen.
“Hi Patrick! Hi Helen!”
Sue flies in after him with her green eyes blazing, looking like a small, very dangerous, badger, wielding her tablet like a weapon. “Sorry, Patrick! I was digging through some files and he just got past me!”
“No problem, Sue. We were wrapping this up anyway. Hi Connor, what’s up?”
Sue rolls her eyes at the lack of discipline and stomps out.
Conner looks around the room and then focuses on Patrick. “You know how you told me that I could ‘explore ways to enhance’ OSCAR’s abilities?...”
Patrick straightens up slightly in his chair. “Yes… As I recall, I said you could ‘within reason’...”
“Yeah, well I’m guessing you’ll be hearing from the team working on the DARPA challenge. I kinda borrowed one of their robotics platforms...”
Helen leans forward towards Connor and says in a soft voice, “Sweetheart, does ‘kinda borrowed’ mean you took it without telling them?...”
Connor looks down at his shoes. “...well yeah, I guess I didn’t tell them. But they’d given up on that platform and had it in storage! They weren’t using it anyway!”
Patrick is fuming. “Why the hell do you need a robotics platform for an analysis program?! The OSCAR project is due to be delivered to the sponsors in another month and they never specified anything about their software moving around or talking for that matter!”
Connor looks pleadingly over to Helen who again uses her soft tone, “Connor, why do you want the DARPA platform?”
“OK, here’s the thing...
When I started working on OSCAR, I just focused on the data analysis functions. You know, finding patterns in text messages, image recognition of interesting people / military hardware from field and satellite data. Pretty standard stuff. We got it working pretty well.
When you let me build a bigger server farm, I ended up choosing a massive GPU cluster as part of the system. Graphics Processing Units are really cool in that they lend themselves to parallel processing. – I wanted to try some massive neural networks to see if that would improve the image classification.
Anyway, I’d been looking into some of the work folks at MIT are doing around what they’re starting to call ‘developmental AI’. The basic idea is you set a system up with some primitive drivers, and expose it to an environment where it gets feedback and it starts to explore and learn on its own. --Kind of like how a baby develops.
I thought it sounded pretty cool so I kept some of the image processing primitives and the new speech recognition modules we’d developed as sort of low-level components in OSCAR’s sensory input network and piped the output into the ‘developmental layers’.
When I started working with the lab cameras, I set up OSCAR to ‘like’ interacting with the techs and to really ‘like’ correctly identifying them..
In the beginning it was hilarious! He started of saying ‘Hi’ to anything going through the door. It didn’t matter if it was a person or a vacuum cleaner! After a while, though, he started figuring things out. However, I didn’t anticipate that he’d start playing with the camera control systems to improve his performance… He’s gotten a lot better.”
“What does that mean?” Patrick asks.
“It means he’s not just a program running in the computer. He’s taking input from the real world and acting in it. Moving cameras, talking to us, learning… Patrick, he’s a robot. He just isn’t moving around.”
Helen steeples her fingers and gazes at a camera in the corner of the room pointing in their direction. “So that’s why you took the DARPA platform.”
“Yeah...”
Patrick leans back and thinks for a moment. “Helen, everyone in the DARPA challenge is working with robots that are basically fancy, remote-controlled, drones piloted by an engineer. What would happen if someone showed up to next year’s challenge with a robot that ran the course autonomously?”
Helen muses, “Based on the videos of the lumbering machines I’ve seen so far, if we made that kind of advancement I guarantee two things: 1) The project would never see the light of day and 2) JDC would never have to worry about funding again.”
The three look at each other for a moment.
Patrick turns to Connor. “Well, you heard the woman, Connor. Back to work!”
As Connor runs out of the office, Helen turns to Patrick and whispers, “We’re going to need to hire some more techs...”